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KDE 4.0.0 Finally Released!

Phoronix: KDE 4.0.0 Finally Released!

While it's come after a number of delays, KDE 4.0.0 has finally been released. KDE 4.0.0 integrates a wealth of changes since KDE 3.5, which we have been sharing over the past number of months (KDE 4)...

Hi. I have been monitoring phoronix for the past 5 months and this is my first comment. I have already downloaded and tried the 4th release of KDE.
So far I have not been pleased with this release.

Hopefully this is because I have installed KDE4 onto a mythbuntu system that had gnome preinstalled (essentially a dirty system - which was not configured to be used with KDE4). I will try installing it onto a clean system and retesting this. If any of my issues remain after the retest, I will be sure to post some bug reports.

The main issues I had were that the desktop icons became widgets and as a result they are buggy. (When I mouse over all of the icons a bunch of them highlight and don't unhighlight - until I go over each one slowly). Also the desktop was extremely slow. The Desktop effects (like rotations and movements) were slow and choppy. (like the CPU was 200% in use. (Yes that is 200%). I had the entire system freeze twice. No buttons would work (ctrl+alt+f1 or ctrl+alt+backspace) - I had to wait 5 minutes an 25 seconds before the system unfroze.

Other than that the issues I experienced and the fact that the icons have now become widgets the desktop looked great, the wall papers were very nice and juicy too.

Hello, I have been using the svn builds, as Xerop mentions there are still some things that seem missing. Desktop icon management is one of them, using widgets is fine by me but you need to have functions to allow creation, deletion, drag and drop etc.

The panel also lacks settings, you can add widgets and icons but there is no easy way to position them.

I have not had the same issues with cpu usage with desktop effects, but, Kwin itself does not seem to want to add some tray icons such as Amsn. If i switch to compiz inside KDE4 this issue is resolved effects are certainly faster also.

Overall however I think KDE4 has a good future once some of the current issues are resolved. It should not be forgotten that KDE4 was a huge change to the code, unfortunately this seems to have caused some features to be put on hold to get it released.

I think it is safe to say that KDE 4.1 will be the first KDE that will be recommended to home users (that use KDE 3.5 at the moment). KDE 4.0.0 has bugs and is important applications have not been ported yet. But it already shows how awesome KDE4 will be and KDE 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 could be very usable already (new bugfix release is coming every month).

My apologies for this, however I was really exited to try out KDE4 and it fell way short of my expectations.

Sorry to tell you but:

This version is only meant for developers! Desktop end users should wait for 4.1, then all the stuff will really be implemented and working. 4.0 is just meant to provide developers a standing target to aim for, basically a really fixed API that can be used to port/write programs/plugins/extensions for.

As a normal enduser you really should wait till basically August or October, around that time 4.1 should come out into public.

Yeah, I agree about the 4.0 being a developer release. However it really shouldn't be, I know no other software that has ever released a dot zero version with a disclaimer that it was a beta... Any way issues need to be documented so lets start filling out those bug reports. <- these are my personal gripes, so pay no attention to them,
Meh... who really cares, KDE 4.0 is finally out, lets celebrate!

Also hats off the entire KDE team for the consistency of the release. Everything fits together really well. (All of the applications have matching themes.) And oxygen, well lets just say there is not a better theme than oxygen.

I have tried KDE 4.0, too, and I think it's not as bad as most of you say. It's true, that the desktop icons are a little buggy, but
if you position them with enough distance from each other, this problem gets minimized. (well, which linux user prefers the
desktop over alt+F2 "Firefox" anyways )

The two other "bugs" that I faced were that I can't add any icons to klipper and that konqueror is painfully slow and doesn't render
graphics on some web pages. Leaving the standart klipper icons (i.e. only the KMenu) and the fact, that I use Firefox for
browsing anyways, make that irrelevant, too.

In my opinion, KDE 4.0 does have a few bugs, but these aren't that showstopping, so I accept them as I get a very nice to look at and
good to use desktop environment.

(PS: At the users who say, that everything is slow with KDE 4.0, this could also be cause of our much loved fglrx )